From: Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 20 1999 - 16:40:06 CDT
Brad Templeton <brad@main.templetons.com> writes:
> That way I can post a message with distribution of "ba" (bay area) and
> if people who are not in the BA see it, it is their newsreader to blame
> or their site -- something they have control over -- and not some admin
> who leaked "ba" out to France either accidentally or deliberately.
The problems caused by a leaking distribution are generally dealt with by
having separate hierarchies for posts of regional interest, which also
solves all sorts of other problems that people want to solve and therefore
would exist anyway. I just don't see why I, as either a Usenet user or
server administrator, should care about regional distributions. All I see
is lots of potential for people who don't understand the purpose to screw
up and accidentally make their post invisible to their audience.
I don't see anything different in your proposal than has been the case
with Distribution for years. It doesn't matter who's doing the filtering;
the fundamental concept just doesn't work. Newsgroup hierarchies are the
right level at which to make the distinction this is trying for.
About the only place where regional distribution buys you anything over
newsgroup hierarchies is for regional announcements, where the subject is
obscure enough to not warrant a regional group, where the announcement is
truly completely regional in nature and no one outside of that region
would care, and where the poster is clued enough to know how to use them
properly. The intersection of those sets seems sufficiently small to me
that LOCAL: tags in subject lines work just fine.
-- Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>